Last night in the SOTU address, Obama made this pronouncement about climate change:
But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.
To that, I say this:
There’s never been any assertion that climate didn’t change, the idea that somehow this is something new to the 21st century is absurd. For example, this graph illustrates just that fact:
Click image for a full sized print (3000 pixels wide, suitable for printing) or choose the PDF below. Note the blip in the top line at the far right, that’s our climate change today. Source: Andy May
Younger_Dryas_to_Present_Time_Line (PDF)
And, as science itself has demonstrated through history, it is never settled, it is always searching for new information, retesting, and sometimes discarding old ideas based on new knowledge.
Saying “the science is settled” is as ridiculous as this famous quote attributed to Lord Kelvin who reportedly said in 1900*
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement”.
* This quote is reputed to be Kelvin’s remark made in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1900). Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomson,_1st_Baron_Kelvin#Pronouncements_later_proven_to_be_false
Equally preposterous (now) is this statement from Kelvin:
In 1898, Kelvin predicted that only 400 years of oxygen supply remained on the planet, due to the rate of burning combustibles.[62][63] In his calculation, Kelvin assumed that photosynthesis was the only source of free oxygen; he did not know all of the components of the oxygen cycle. He could not even have known all of the sources of photosynthesis: for example the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus—which accounts for more than half of marine photosynthesis—was not discovered until 1986.
Kelvin’s pronouncement, which he believed to be true at the time based on the facts he had at hand, were later disproved by new science and obviously discarded. But, imagine if there were a panic movement then to conserve oxygen, with “oxygen taxes” applied, massive government funded research implemented, and reams of NGO’s feeding on the frenzy demanding a host of new laws and changes in human behavior to avert the crisis.
They’d look pretty stupid to us in the context of science knowledge today, wouldn’t they?
Great collection of graphs. Gives the big picture all in one place. My friend who believes what the MSM tells him is not capable of studying this long enough to understand the import. This is the warmest decade in history. CO2 is skyrocketing. Seal level is rising. Ice is melting. The POTUS sez it is so. Period.
Chad Wozniak says:
“And the hypocrite goes right along with his own DENIER meme – the one that DENIES such things as the 33,000 dead from hypothermia in the UK last year, courtesy of the carbon tax.”
Chad, I think that end is the goal if many of the Gia worshipers.
The statement “climate change is a fact” is nothing more than a equivocation based on two meanings of “climate change”. One is the ordinary English meanings of those words, and as others have said anyone would agree with that claim. “It is settled. The sun will rise again tomorrow morning.” The other meaning of “climate change” is the one cooked up by the UN, namely
“We take climate change to mean a change in climate caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.” That assertion is not “settled science”. The further implied claim that the man-made climate change is a matter to be dealt with by government policy is an even less established “scientific fact”. The even further implicit claim that even if policy to deal with it is advisable, the best such policy is restrictions on CO2 emissions is even less settled as a fact. The even further claim that such restrictions are advisable for the US and Europe if the rest of the world does not go along with it is even less settled as fact. Yet the POTUS expects many of his listeners to hear him saying all these claims are “settled fact” while simultaneously maintaining “deniability” if challenged.
I think we should embrace that “Climate Change” is real and caused by natural processes. Rather than be skeptics of global warming caused by man, we can be believers that climate change is real and naturally caused. When they say the climate change is a fact, we can completely agree with their position. If they want to argue the climate is warming or is driven by CO2 emissions, then they need to make that argument. Everyone believes the climate changes. Since the climate has always changed, and we all agree upon that, then no actions are required.
Tim Obrien said @ur momisugly January 29, 2014 at 9:59 am
Ah yes, a Big Lie in the service of Truth. Even the wiki-bloody-pedia gets it right:
John William Draper was an American scientist, philosopher, physician, chemist, historian and photographer.
Andrew Dickson White was an American diplomat, historian, and educator, who was the co-founder of Cornell University.
Washington Irving was an American author, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century.
According to Stephen Jay Gould
Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that
Lord Kelvin may have been wrong on many a thing, he was darn right on this one:
0 K is pretty cold.
It is unfortunate that by this repeated but apparently still flawed warning about climate change due to global warming, the democrats are advising the various regions of the United States to prepare for unprecedented global warming and are thus diverting tax funds and public attention away from preparing for statewide and national wide serious winter cooling which is much more likely to be on the horizon and could be more disruptive and damaging than warming as the southeast regions around Atlanta with all their ice and snow have found out yesterday and today. This IS not a new event because winters have been cooling now for 15 years in every state of this country.but do you think the democrarts are telling you this and if not why not?..Many states may find them selves totally unprepared for the winters ahead in terms of secure energy stocks and proper road infrastructure to withstand the colder winter ice and snow .. The reason why this writer is speaking up is because the past IPCC forecasts and models seem to bare no relationship to observed reality and using IPCC reports to shape public policy is premature, wrong and wasteful of public money that is urgently needed for other goals like helping to rebuild after “natural” disasters caused by “natural” forces which will always be with us.
The promoter of CAGW have done a good job of filling the term “Climate Change” with all sorts of implied meaning. When the President says, “Climate Change I know exactly what he means — he means CAGW. Skeptics need to be very careful not to fall into the linguistics trap that is being set by the CAGW promoters. If we casually adopt the phrase “Climate Change” when arguing about the theory of CAGW, then we get framed as flat-earthers because climate change is a fact; and to argue that the climate never changes is silly to the extreme. But too often I see skeptics using the phrase ‘climate change’. Even in the comments here, people got caught up in that trap.
When you really dissect it, the climate wars are about politics and not science. The scientific argument is fairly narrow and would not elicit the kind of all-out tribal warfare that we see if politics were not the central issue. Think about it this way:
(1) The climate is always changing. No one argues that fact.
(2) There is evidence that the earth warmed in the second half of the 20th century, but the exact magnitude of that warming is in dispute due to problems with the temperature record. Few would argue that surface temps did not increase in the second half of the 20th century — although the evidence is largely anecdotal.
(3) Humans have contributed to a changing climate … as have all of the major species. For example, plankton has a profound effect on the climate — certainly more than humans. So I think skeptics are better off to acknowledge that all living things effect the climate.
(4) The central question remains as to how much of the change seen in the second half of the 20th century can be attributed to human CO2 emissions vs other causes. In my mind, this is where we need to be quite precise in our language.
The battle is really about whether Human CO2 emissions have a big impact (equilibrium climate sensitivity about 4 Kelvin), a moderate impact (equilibrium climate sensitivity between 2 and 4 Kelvin) or a small impact (equilibrium climate sensitivity below 2 Kelvin) on Average Global Surface Temperature.
I’d love to see the Skeptic community narrow the argument. For example, to say “I am skeptical of the claims that equilibrium climate sensitivity is greater the 2” forces the CAGW proponents to argue in the specific. Its also very hard for them to label that position as anti-science, flat-earther talk because its a reasonable position based on sophisticated knowledge of the topic.
We just look silly when we adopt the linguistics of our opponents simply because “we know what they mean”.
The more our cerebral president seeks to educate us the more I think he should endeavor to study, at least a little bit, that which he seeks to educate us about.
Careful Anthony. You do realize you’re just begging for an IRS audit, right? That’s assuming the DOJ doesn’t find grounds to investigate you.
I loved this line ,
“WSJ: President declares end of global warming debate, while climate scientists struggle to explain the ‘pause’
Steve from Rockwood said @ur momisugly January 29, 2014 at 10:49 am
Dunno, but my Zenith 8 MHz 286 had 3 MB of RAM.
@The Pompous Git – Extended or Expanded? The 286 architecture could not address over 1mb. So they did tricks to use more (paging).
Tim Obrien says:
January 29, 2014 at 9:59 am
Academics in 1491 did not think the earth was flat. The issue with which Spanish savants disagreed with Columbus was not over the shape of the earth but its size. They were right & he was wrong, but lucked out by running into new continents where he expected to find eastern Asia.
Virtually all scholars in the West in 1491 knew that the earth is a sphere, & its approximate size. Some Church Fathers before Augustine still took the Bible literally, so supported a flat earth covered by a solid dome & rejected the Ptolemaic/Aristotelian system of nested concentric spheres, but few if any did so after c. AD 400.
“But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.”
I thought this president was supposed to understand nuances?
Kevin Bonnet says:
I think we should embrace that “Climate Change” is real and caused by natural processes. Rather than be skeptics of global warming caused by man, we can be believers that climate change is real and naturally caused. When they say the climate change is a fact, we can completely agree with their position. If they want to argue the climate is warming or is driven by CO2 emissions, then they need to make that argument. Everyone believes the climate changes. Since the climate has always changed, and we all agree upon that, then no actions are required.
Kevin, that is exactly the position taken by the majority of readers here. The problem is getting the alarmist cult to engage in that discussion. As it stands, they run and hide out from any debate that would clarify the respective positions.
See, they want the public to believe something that is false: that scientific skeptics do not believe in climate change. In reality, it is Michael Mann’s followers who believe that nonsense. Mann showed in his [thoroughly debunked] hockey stick chart that the climate was static, until humans started emitting CO2 in large quantities.
But skeptics know that the planet’s temperature has always fluctuated, naturally, and that the current global warming cycle is neither unusual nor unprecedented: it has all happened before, and to a much greater degree — during times when [harmless, beneficial] CO2 was much lower.
I think you are missing a subtle change in language they are now using. Notice that Obama did not use the word science in connection with climate or debate being settled, instead he talks of a debate. Is this a first sign of change in their argumentation? Have they finally realized the anti-scientific nature of consensus science?
It is rather ironic that on the same night that “climate change” (aka global “warming”) is being touted in the SOTU speech, Atlanta, GA (home of the “we’ll keep you safe” Weather Channel) is experiencing a snow emergency!
Storm Strands Thousands in Ill-Equipped South
By KIM SEVERSON and ALAN BLINDERJAN. 29, 2014
ATLANTA — Thousands of commuters were trapped in cars overnight on highways in the greater Atlanta area, hundreds of students remained inside dozens of schools Wednesday morning and at least 50 children spent the night on school buses because of an ice storm that is still gripping the deepest parts of the South.
…
Several officials spent time trying to explain how things got so bad so quickly
“This came very suddenly,” Craig Witherspoon, superintendent of Birmingham City Schools in Alabama, said Wednesday. An estimated 600 students in his district spent the night in schools, tended by about 100 staff members.
“All reports for the Birmingham area were that we’d get a light dusting to the south of where we were,” Mr. Witherspoon said. “And the flakes started coming, and then it just poured out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/us/ice-storm-southern-united-states.html
—
Please remember this when people like climate scientists and Weather Channel meteorologists claim they want to “keep you safe”…
Steve of rock wood says:
Originally with MS DOS the maximum RAM was 640kb, with later versions of DOS the OS could use expanded memory up to 1mb and extended which took it up to 4mb. My first PC was a 286 running at 20mhz with 40mb HDD and 1mb RAM, OS was MS DOS 4 this was in 1991. The first upgrade I carrie out was to fit a sound card to run DOOM! It didn’t run well so I doubled the RAM to 2mb, for the cost of £25 (about $32).
Bill Gates did say that 640kb was all the RAM anyone would ever need. The people that sold me the computer told me that I would never fill the HDD!
andrewmharding said @ur momisugly January 29, 2014 at 12:13 pm
It really is the day for false truths [sigh]. There is no evidence that Gates ever said that!
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484
BTW the decision to load drivers in the High Memory Area (between 640 KB and 1 MB was made by IBM.
@The Pompous Git – I had heard it was some faceless IBM middle manager (and it was 1mb). But thanks to Intel and their bugs, I previously misspoke. You could actually access the first 48k of the 2nd mb of RAM on a 286 due to a bug in the 286 chipset. They could have corrected it when it was found, but by that time, memory managers were using it! So they decided not to.
In all fairness he’s not the first President to mistake a cycle for a trend.
Thomas Jefferson on Climate Change, 1781
”A change in our climate however is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep. They do not often lie, below the mountains, more than one, two, or three days, and very rarely a week. They are remembered to have been formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance. The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now. This change has produced an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold, in the spring of the year, which is very fatal to fruits. From the year 1741 to 1769, an interval of twenty-eight years, there was no instance of fruit killed by the frost in the neighbourhood of Monticello. An intense cold, produced by constant snows, kept the buds locked up till the sun could obtain, in the spring of the year, so fixed an ascendency as to dissolve those snows, and protect the buds, during their developement, from every danger of returning cold. The accumulated snows of the winter remaining to be dissolved all together in the spring, produced those overflowings of our rivers, so frequent then, and so rare now.”
That ‘blip’ looks very hockey sticky to me, higher than MWP.
philjourdan
January 29, 2014 at 12:16 pm
says:
‘@Tom J – Mr. Tom, I served with Nixon, I knew Nixon, I was a friend of Nixon. Tom, you are no Richard M. Nixon!
Sorry, I could not resist. ;-)’
I must admit, I am at a loss for words (like that’s anything unusual). Well, on one thing I think we must agree, I’m no Barack Obama either. Best wishes to you, sir. [:-{> (I’m not frowning; that’s a pix of me with a mustache and a long ‘v’ shaped beard)
@Tom J – Agreed, you are no Barrack Obama. he does not have a cool beard. 😉
Interestingly, from Job 26:7— “He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.” Consistent with the Arctic Ocean, polar cap, and the axis of a rotating, closed-curvature Earth suspended in space. Best guess, 6th century B.C.
Besides the falsifiability flip-flop, there’s also ” Kelvin’s “. ;p
John West says:
January 29, 2014 at 12:28 pm
An important difference is that Jefferson actually observed & recorded weather & climate data himself. I don’t think that his statement rules out the possibility of cycles, but merely notes what he has observed & been told about “climate change”, since he is talking about periods long enough to count as a climate rather than WX.
He was also willing to change his mind when presented with more information, as he did for instance on the question of species extinction.